DAX usage on OSC?

We enabled the Oracle Database InMemory option on an Oracle SuperCluster M7 and wanted to see if our SPARC DAX engines are used. With newer Solaris releases you could use daxstat to get some more info next to busstat or dtrace but issuing daxstat brought an error:

root@OSC:~# daxstat
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "/usr/bin/daxstat", line 969, in <module>
 sys.exit(main())
 File "/usr/bin/daxstat", line 962, in main
 return process_opts()
 File "/usr/bin/daxstat", line 905, in process_opts
 dax_ids, dax_queue_ids = derive_dax_opts(args, parser)
 File "/usr/bin/daxstat", line 844, in derive_dax_opts
 dax_ids = find_ids(query, parser, None)
 File "/usr/bin/daxstat", line 683, in find_ids
 all_dax_kstats = RCU.list_objects(kbind.Kstat(), query)
 File "/usr/lib/python2.7/vendor-packages/rad/connect.py", line 391, in list_objects
 a RADInterface object
 File "/usr/lib/python2.7/vendor-packages/rad/client.py", line 213, in _raise_error
 packer.pack_int((timestamp % 1000000) * 1000)
rad.client.NotFoundError: Error listing com.oracle.solaris.rad.kstat:type=Kstat: not found (3)

In my installation the following was not installed:

root@OSC:~# pkg list -a | grep kstat
library/python-2/python-kstat                     5.11-0.175.2.0.0.27.0      --o
system/management/rad/module/rad-kstat            0.5.11-0.175.3.17.0.1.0    ---


root@OSC:~# pkg install system/management/rad/module/rad-kstat
[...]
root@OSC:~# pkg list | grep rad
system/management/rad                             0.5.11-0.175.3.21.0.4.0    i--
system/management/rad/client/rad-c                0.5.11-0.175.3.21.0.3.0    i--
system/management/rad/client/rad-python           0.5.11-0.175.3.17.0.1.0    i--
system/management/rad/module/rad-kstat            0.5.11-0.175.3.17.0.1.0    i--
system/management/rad/module/rad-smf              0.5.11-0.175.3.17.0.1.0    i--
root@OSC:~#
root@OSC:~# svcadm disable svc:/system/rad:local svc:/system/rad:local-http
root@OSC:~# svcadm enable svc:/system/rad:local svc:/system/rad:local-http

And yes, that was it 😉

root@OSC:~# daxstat -ad 60
DAX    commands fallbacks    input    output %busy
ALL    32541246     15222     1.0G     78.0M     0
ALL        5760         0     6.0M      0.0M     0
ALL        2240         0     6.0M      0.0M     0
root@OSC:~# daxstat 1 1
DAX    commands fallbacks    input    output %busy
  0        7062         0     0.0M      0.0M     0
  1        7071         0     0.0M      0.0M     0
  2        7071         0     0.0M      0.0M     0
  3        7067         0     0.0M      0.0M     0
  4        7073         0     0.0M      0.0M     0
  5        7071         0     0.0M      0.0M     0
  6        7066         0     0.0M      0.0M     0
  7        7067         0     0.0M      0.0M     0
  8     4078650      1878     0.0M      0.0M     0
  9     4078651      1941     0.0M      0.0M     0
 10     4078699      1870     0.0M      0.0M     0
 11     4078674      1914     0.0M      0.0M     0
 12     4078720      1923     0.0M      0.0M     0
 13     4078723      1929     0.0M      0.0M     0
 14     4078706      1897     0.0M      0.0M     0
 15     4078721      1871     0.0M      0.0M     0
 16        5696         0     0.0M      0.0M     0
 17        5705         0     0.0M      0.0M     0
 18        5704         0     0.0M      0.0M     0
 19        5704         0     0.0M      0.0M     0
 20        5702         0     0.0M      0.0M     0
 21        5703         0     0.0M      0.0M     0
 22        5700         0     0.0M      0.0M     0
 23        5702         0     0.0M      0.0M     0


As you can see, the dax engines are working…

In this example I rearranged some cores to the IM-zone to get more DAX pipelines and could use DAX engines from more than one chip, because we are also using more memory than one socket owns (around 1.2 TB). I read that “DAX units and pipelines are not hardwired to certains cores and you can submit work to any DAX unit on a CPU” in this article which explains DAX very good. So I thought it makes sense to spread cores for the zone around sockets. After changing the core pinning from one socket to three sockest I saw three times 8 units in use. That could be the reason why only the middle is more busy than the rest… might be a NUMA effect, I will test to repopulate the IM store to see if it spreads the load soon…

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.